What does erotic intelligence mean to us as therapists, coaches, and relationship professionals?

How do we help our clients cultivate a feeling of vitality? How do we help them go beyond recovering from trauma to come back to life? And how can we help them achieve a deeper connection when we are struggling ourselves?

Eros, also known as eroticism, is a quality of aliveness, vibrancy and vitality that is critical to both life and the clinical relationship. It’s a sense of creativity, agency and pleasure that we often aim for in our clients but neglect within ourselves.

Esther and her guests will share a multi-faceted conceptualization of eroticism and how practitioners can apply it.

Using a multicultural and interdisciplinary lens, Esther and her guests will share a toolkit focused on eroticism to therapists and coaches that will enable you to engage with difficult topics and therapeutic choice points, taking on relational challenges around love and desire with curiosity, renewed energy and confidence.

As we work to imagine and build a more liberated world, we are tasked with deconstructing external and internal oppressive ways of being. We exist in a culture that sends us daily messages that we are less than, should feel ashamed to be our authentic selves, to operate in competition instead of collaboration, that institutional violence and exploitation are the norm, and that we are not powerful enough to actualize liberation. These messages are also internalized, normalized, and perpetuated through our intrapersonal and interpersonal interactions. Through unpacking and challenging the ways that we’ve been separated from our authentic selves, our most loving and erotic selves, our most liberated selves, we will begin to identify how pleasure can serve as a pathway to sexual and social liberation.

This talk is a part of 2019 AASECT’s Annual Conference. For more info visit this website.

Skin Hunger is the reaction to a lack of meaningful physical connection with another human being(s).  We live in a society that sexualizes all forms of touch, limiting the amount of platonic touch we are allowed to experience. Various studies have proven the healing power of touch and highlight what it means to be in a touch-deprived society, as well as how this deprivation can impact sociability, communication skills, emotion regulation, personal development, etc. This makes it difficult for us to ask for what we want, receive rejection, explore our experiences and narratives with touch, etc. Tackling all these issues, this workshop addresses various concerns, culminating with participants voluntarily partaking in a safe space for people of color to come and hug, cuddle and practice developing platonic intimacy.

This workshop is a part of the Crooked Room Conference.

This event is an abbreviated teach back version of the week-long Black Feminist Organizing School held at the Highlander Center in August. Like the national school, participants are those who seek a (deeper) understanding of patriarchy and its application to our organizing work. The St. Louis workshop, "Some of us are Brave," will share the same goals as the school:
>To deepen and strengthen the consciousness, analysis, and organizing capacity of Black feminist leaders engaged in movement/social change work;
>To provide a space for study, training, and engagement around key concepts such as black feminist thought, intersectionality, what is power, Black feminist economies, seeing like a state, what is organizing and organizing with a Black feminist lens, gender and sexuality, and beyond.;
>To develop and/or sharpen emerging organizing skills(direct action, conflict management, etc.) to meet the new and changing needs of movement;
>To connect and build with other Black feminists who are active in other movements and issues.

The following workshops will be presented:
Personal Power: From Self-Transformation to Collective Transformation: by Jamala Rogers (Black Feminist Organizing School Faculty)
Political Economy: by Nikia Paulette (BFOS Participant)
Dismantling the Master’s House: by Dalychia Saah (BFOS Participant)

Our Creative Retreats (OCR) is a gathering for women where the desire to achieve our highest potential is realized through physical practice, nutrition, and community ideation sessions. For this Creative Retreat we will be connecting with our Sacral Chakra and discussing Pleasure. By moving through several tools, activities, and practices we will explore our current and desired relationship to pleasure, sexuality, emotions, creativity, and sensation. Sacral Chakra represents not only the physical but also the energy and magic that emanates from our womb space that assists us in unleashing our passionate desires for our body, relationships, work life, healing, and personal success. We are non touch (unless platonic hugs are your thing) and aim to cultivate a safe space for learning and healing.

The lovely Dalychia Saah: Co-Founder of Afrosexology, writer, purveyor of truth and liberation, advocate of love and self-agency and wearer of precision-tight AFROS will be leading our practice for the month. She will guide us through activities to explore and develop our own pleasure practices, pleasure proverbs, and pleasure prayers. 

Dinner and goodies are included. Join us. We have limit seating available and you don't miss out!

Skin Hunger is the desire to have meaningful physical contact with another person. We live in a society that sexualizes all forms of touch,  limiting the amount of platonic touch we are allowed to experience. For those of us who are more skin hungry or who are not in romantic/sexual relationships, we often go long periods feeling touch deprived. S[KIN] is a gathering for people of color to experience platonic, consensual touch, hugs, cuddles, and other forms of non-sexual intimacy. 

S[KIN] is a private event. All participants will have to complete an online screening survey in order to attend. Every gathering will begin with practice exercises around consent, boundaries, and saying and hearing no, and communicating our needs, so that we can all have the same foundation before platonic touch is shared. 

This event will be potluck style. You will be asked to bring a dish or drink to share and to contribute $10 towards the costs associated with this event. 

Please complete this survey - https://dalychia.typeform.com/to/eW9SsU

As we work to imagine and build a more liberated world, we are tasked with deconstructing external and internal oppressive ways of being. We exist in a culture that sends us daily messages that we are less than, should feel ashamed to be our authentic selves, to operate in competition instead of collaboration, that institutional violence and exploitation are the norm, and that we are not powerful enough to actualize liberation. These messages are also internalized, normalized, and perpetuated through our intrapersonal and interpersonal interactions. Through unpacking and challenging the ways that we’ve been separated from our authentic selves, our most loving and erotic selves, our most liberated selves, we will begin to identify how pleasure can serve as a pathway to sexual and social liberation.

This talk is a part of 2018 AASECT’s Summer Institute.

Our Creative Retreats (OCR) is a gathering for women where the desire to achieve our highest potential is realized through physical practice, nutrition, and community ideation sessions. Our objective for Creative Retreat will be to center on the 4th Chakra, Anahata aka Heart. Our theme will support the topics of self love, compassion, spirituality, grief, forgiveness, divine love and relationships. This chakra is super potent and located in a very transformative position. The 4th Chakra serves as a bridge between our body, mind, emotions, and spirit. It is our source of love and connection with self, community, spirit and beyond.

We have a special treat for you all! Our sister and co-curator of the organization Afrosexology, Dalychia Saah, will be facilitating our physical practice leveraging visualization or meditation exercises to help active the theme. Please bring your yoga mat or a blanket to sit on and a journal to write in. Also you are invited to bring any crystals you’d like to hold or have near you as we complete the visualization exercises.

Liberia is the country founded by freed enslaved African Americans, who returned to the continent and essentially enslaved and oppressed the natives. As a Liberian American, I’ve spent much of my time trying to understand how oppressed people oppress others. We’ve seen this occur at a national scale in examples like Liberia and how Israel treats Palestinians down to interpersonal levels of classism and transphobia in feminist and/or Pro-Black groups. What I’ve learned about liberation from Liberia, is that it wasn’t enough to leave the physical conditions of enslavement, or to even leave the country that represented trauma, loss, death, oppression. The oppression we are fighting against is not just external, but it’s also internal. I also learned that as we work, fight, and prepare for freedom/ liberation, it’s not enough to know what we’re fighting against, we have to know what we’re fighting for, because if we don’t have a clear vision of what we want, we will replicate all that we know. This talk is around deconstructing, analyzing, and unpacking the pieces of the oppressor we’ve internalized and normalized, so that we are not limited to a future where we replicate these same conditions that we’re seeking liberation from.

This talk is a part of PolyDallas Millennium.